[QUOTE=company man 1;37368]Alvis this is a good story on the BOPs. I didn’t like the way they took it upon themselves to try to throw in the cement job with inacurate statements.[/QUOTE]
Time to look again at the sworn testimony of the prinicipals:
[B]Testimony of Miles Ezell, Transocean, senior tool-pusher[/B]
Miles Ezell, the senior tool-pusher on the Deepwater Horizon, gave a vivid and horrifying description of the destructive moments when the rig lost control of the well, and natural gas and oil shot to the surface and ignited, killing 11 of his colleagues. Ezell had handed off control of drilling operations to his relief, Jason Anderson. Ezell knew there was some concern about a negative pressure test conducted about 4 p.m. on April 20, and he offered to stay and help Anderson and the others. But Anderson told him, “I got this, I’ll call you if there’s a problem.” Ezell said he had worked with Anderson a long time and trusted him completely. “He was probably more experienced shutting in kicks than anybody on the Deepwater Horizon,” Ezell said of Anderson. “In fact, he’d just been offered a position running well-control training.” A few hours later, Anderson was killed by a kick of gas that shot out of control.
Ezell said he was just settling in to sleep when he got a call from the drill floor.
"It was 10 minutes to 10. It was Steve Curtis, the assistant driller. He said, ‘We have a situation, the well is blowing out, we have mud going to the crown.’ I was just horrified. I said, ‘Do y’allhave it shut in?’ He said, ‘Jason’s shutting it in now.’ Then he said, and I’ll never forget this: ‘Randy, we need your help.’"
As Ezell went to get his boots, an explosion threw him across the room and against a bulkhead. Heavy smoke filled the quarters and methane droplets hit his face, he said. He found a colleague, Wyman Wheeler, lying in the rubble. Then he found a visiting official from Transocean crying for help under a pile of debris. He stayed with his comrades until stretchers came and helped them into life rafts.
[B]Testimony of Christopher Haire, Halliburton, cementer:[/B]Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O’Berry / U.S. Coast Guard Christopher Haire, a cementer with Halliburton, discusses what transpired aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig when it exploded, April 20. The Halliburton employee who performed several of the cement lining jobs on the Deepwater Horizon said Friday that only the deepest casing in the well was closed with a new kind of light, quicker-curing nitrogen-infused cement.
The testimony from cementer Christopher Haire was something of a surprise because Jimmy Harrell, the top drilling official on the rig when it exploded in the Gulf on April 20, testified Thursday that the rig had only used the nitrified cement on shallower casings. Harrell said he’d been warned that nitrogen from the cement could get in the well hole and cause problems.
The well plan had changed several times before the incident, in which natural gas and oil got into the well and shot up the marine riser to the rig, igniting in huge fireballs.
[B]Final testimony of Chris Pleasant, Transocean, subsea supervisor:[/B]
Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O’Berry / U.S. Coast Guard ChristopherPleasant, a subsea supervisor with Transocean, testifies at the Deepwater Horizon joint investigation hearing Friday. Contrary to prior testimony from other rig leaders and BP’s drilling engineerthat tests gave no reason for concern and conditions were safe for the Deepwater Horizon to displace heavy drilling mud the evening of April20, the rig’s subsea supervisor testified Friday that workers were confused by some test results that showed possible leaks in the well.
Chris Pleasant, the man in charge of the blowout preventer and other well systems on the sea floor, said he was part of lengthy discussions about fluid losses during a negative pressure test about four hours before the accident.
In a negative pressure test, the well head is shut off using annular valves in the massive blowout preventer device on the sea floor, and workers measure whether pressure causes any mud to come up to the rig from the marine riser that runs down to the well.
Pleasant said when he began his shift that day, he went to the drill floor and found a tool-pusher, one of the main drilling crew, discussing results of the negative pressure test with Robert Kaluza, BP’s top official on the rig. He said the tool-pusher, Wyman Wheeler, was concerned that barrels of mud had leaked out during the pressure test. The workers disagreed about where the mud had been lost.
Pleasant said Kaluza, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination this week to avoid testifying, was the one who insisted that the test results weren’t satisfactory.
“Bob Kaluza said that according to APD (the rig’s permit to drill), we didn’t achieve the results,” Pleasant said.
Similarly, Christopher Haire, a cementer for Halliburton, said drillers were “unsatisfied” with the negative test, which returned 15barrels of mud, rather than the ideal of no mud released.
And yet, the top drilling official on the rig, Offshore Installation Manager Jimmy Harrell, and BP’s well designer on shore, Mark Hafle, testified previously that they believed the pressure tests were successful and no cause for concern.
Kaluza and the other BP man on the rig, Donald Vidrine, ended up deciding to alter some valve pressures and do a second negative test that showed no mud returns and that Pleasant agreed appeared to be a successful test.
[B]Earlier testimony of Chris Pleasant, Transocean, subsea supervisor:[/B]
Moments after explosions rang out and set the Deepwater Horizon on fire April 20, the man in charge of the blowout preventer that’s supposed to close the well on the sea floor said he asked the captain to hit an emergency disconnect system.
“Calm down! We’re not EDS’ing,” Capt. Curt Kuchta told subsea engineer Chris Pleasant, according to Pleasant’s testimony Friday before a Marine Board panel investigating the incident.
But about 30 seconds later, with total chaos on the rig, Pleasant decided on his own to hit the emergency button, which would trigger the blowout preventer’s shear rams to close the well and unhitch the rig. It didn’t work.
“It went through the sequence at the panel, but it (the signal to disconnect) never left the panel. I had no hydraulics,” Pleasant recalled.
He said it was about four or five minutes later when Kuchta decided it was time to get the rig off the well.
"The captain asks Daun Winslow (a visiting Transocean official), ‘Do we EDS?’ The captain comes over and tells me to EDS, not knowing I already hit the button."
Pleasant said he had the authority to activate the emergency disconnect.
“I am the authority,” he said. “It’s my equipment.”
[B]Testimony of Mark Hafle, BP drilling engineer:[/B]
Petty Officer 2nd Class Thomas M. Blue / U.S. Coast Guard Mark Hafle, with BP, testifies at the Deepwater Horizon joint investigation hearing into the incident in Kenner on Friday. A BP engineer who helped design the Gulf oil well that exploded April 20wouldn’t admit that his handiwork led to the disaster, despite brow-beatings from a lawyer and a member of the federal investigative panel.
Mark Hafle, the BP drilling engineer who wrote plans for well casings and cement seals on the Deepwater Horizon’s well, testified that the well had lost thousands of barrels of mud at the bottom. But he said models run onshore showed alterations to the cement program would resolve the issues, and when asked if a cement failure allowed the well to “flow” gas and oil, he wouldn’t capitulate.
Hafle said he made several changes to casing designs in the last few days before the well blew, including the addition of the two casing liners that weren’t part of the original well design because of problems where the earthen sides of the well were “ballooning.” He also worked with Halliburton engineers to design a plan for sealing the well casings with cement.
John McCarroll from Minerals Management Service, a member of a six-person investigative panel holding hearings in Kenner, couldn’t hold back his opinion that cement failures allowed the well to flow as he questioned Hafle.
“Don’t you think for that size casing, you set up your Halliburton cementer for failure, especially when you had a loss return zone (where drilling mud was seeping into the earth) below the hole?” McCarroll pointedly asked.
“I believe it’s a sound engineering practice,” said Hafle, who said the internal investigation would have to be completed before anyone knows what went wrong.
“Personally, I would not want to try to attempt that,” McCarroll added.
Ned Kohnke, a lawyer for Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, also asked Hafle pointed questions, especially about BP’s decision not to run a key cement integrity test called a cement bondlog. Kohnke told Hafle that The Times-Picayune had reported that BP sent a team of testers home before performing that test, but Hafle said he wasn’t aware of that.
Hafle gave what appeared to be conflicting testimony about the cement bond log, considered by engineers to be the “gold standard” of testing cement jobs. Initially, when asked why no cement bond log was conducted, Hafle said it was because “we had not gotten that far in the well plan when the incident (blowout) occurred.” But later on, he said there was no plan to conduct the test and the crew was about to close off the well with a final plug, which would close of the well to cement bond log tests.
Kohnke asked Hafle what could have gone wrong if it wasn’t BP’s cement design, but Hafle said he wouldn’t speculate.
“I don’t believe you’ll ever find out how the hydrocarbons got in the well bore,” he said.
© 2010 NOLA.com. All rights reserved. http://blog.nola.com/2010_gulf_oil_spill/print.html?entry=/2010/05/oil_spill_hearings_transocean.html
[B]Hearings: BP representative overruled drillers, insisted on displacing mud with seawater[/B]
[I]This is an update from the [B]joint U.S. Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service hearings[/B] in Kenner Wednesday into the [B]explosion and fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig[/B] on April 20, which killed 11 workers and created the [B]Gulf of Mexico oil spill[/B] currently fouling Louisiana’s coast.[/I]
Chris Granger / The Times-Picayune Members of the investigation team, from left to right, Lt. Robert Butts, Ross Wheatley, and Capt. Hung Nguyen, listen to testimony from Capt. Carl Smith at the Radisson Hotel in Kenner on Wednesday.
The chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon testified Wednesday that he was at a planning meeting 11 hours before the rig exploded at which the BP company man overruled drillers from rig owner Transocean and insisted on displacing protective drilling mud from the riser that connected the rig to the oil well.
“I recall a skirmish between the company man, the OIM (offshore installation manager), the tool-pusher and the driller,” said Doug Brown, one of 115 rig workers who survived the April 20 disaster. "The driller was outlining what would be taking place, whereupon the company man stood up and said, ‘No, we’ll be having some changes to that.’ It had to do with displacing the riser for later on. The OIM, tool-pusher and driller disagreed with that, but the company man said, ‘Well, this is how it’s gonna be,’ and the tool-pusher, driller and OIM reluctantly agreed."
Before Brown came to the witness stand at the hearings in Kenner, a ship captain with 15 years of drilling experience told the joint investigative panel that he doesn’t know why a rig would displace the protective column of heavy mud with light seawater before closing off a well.
“That’s something you learn at well-control school,” said Capt. Carl Smith, a former Coast Guard captain serving as an expert witness for the panel. "If you’re circulating fluid, you need to monitor how much is going in and how much is coming out. If you get more fluid out than in, it’s an indicator that something’s going on."
Smith testified that there is an inherent conflict on any drilling rig between the company that’s leasing the rig and oilfield and the drilling operators. He said the “company man” represents a firm that leases the rig and often pays $500,000 a day to drill for the oil, so is concerned about speed and cost. The crew, meanwhile, is generally more concerned about safety and controlling the well, he said.
“That’s a natural point of conflict that I’ve seen,” Smith said. "Some (company men) have become outright adversaries, but they’re the people paying the bills. They control helicopters, the boats, what’s going on and off the rig. But I have to say, most of them are safety conscious."
© 2010 NOLA.com. All rights reserved. http://blog.nola.com/2010_gulf_oil_spill/print.html?entry=/2010/05/hearings_bp_representative_ove.html
[B]Hearings: Transocean official denies BP pressured them to complete work quickly[/B]
Published: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 9:34 AM Updated: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 10:15 AM
[B]David Hammer, The Times-Picayune [/B]
[I]This is an update from the [B]joint hearings[/B] by the U.S. Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service held in Kenner Thursday into the explosion and fire aboard the [B]Deepwater Horizon oil rig[/B] on April 20, which killed 11 workers and created the Gulf of Mexico [B]oil spill[/B] currently fouling Louisiana’s coast.[/I]
Transocean’s top drilling official on the Deepwater Horizon said he was wrapped up with hosting top BP officials in the hours before his rig blew up April 20, but he denied Thursday that his crew was under any pressure from BP to complete its work more quickly.
Under tough questioning by Jason Mathews of the federal Minerals Management Service, the rig’s offshore installation manager, Jimmy Harrell, said the cost of delays at the oilfield 50 miles off the Louisiana coast was not compromising safety on the rig.
“So there was no pressure at all about being about $20 million behind?” Mathews asked, referring to documents showing the Deepwater Horizon had been scheduled to start work at another oilfield 43 days earlier.
“I’m sure at times people want to get it done and want to meet timelines,” said Harrell in his Mississippi drawl. "But never to jeopardize safety."
BP had sent some high-level personnel to the rig the day of the accident, led by Pat O’Brien, the corporate vice president for drilling, to congratulate the rig’s crew for seven years without a lost-time incident and to discuss the completion of work at the exploratory well. Harrell said he spent a lot of time the day of the accident meeting with the company representatives and giving tours.
Mathews and another panel member, Russ Wheatley of the Coast Guard, wanted to know if the executives were there to put pressure on the crew, which had been forced to drill a bypass well in March, to speed up.
“It’s part of the job,” Harrell said. "No pressure concerns whatsoever."
Harrell, who said he was taking a shower when explosions set the rig on fire, said he directed the subsea engineer, Chris Pleasant, to activate the emergency disconnect system, which would have separated the rig from its drilling riser and the spewing well so the vessel could at least get away. Harrell said he saw Pleasant press the activation switch, but it didn’t work.
He also said that as he stumbled from his quarters to the bridge, he saw the control panel that’s used to activate the blowout preventer, a four-story stack of valves and pistons at the bottom of the sea that acts as a final fail-safe to shut off the well. He said it “wasn’t normal,” that yellow lights indicating certain functions were “blocked” or in a neutral position, were more prevalent than usual.
Attempts to activate the blowout preventer also failed.
© 2010 NOLA.com. All rights reserved. http://blog.nola.com/2010_gulf_oil_spill/print.html?entry=/2010/05/hearings_transocean_official_d.html
A prominent Houston attorney with a long record of winning settlements from oil companies says he has new evidence suggesting that the Deepwater Horizon’s top managers knew of problems with the rig before it exploded last month, causing the worst oil spill in US history. Tony Buzbee, a lawyer representing 15 rig workers and dozens of shrimpers, seafood restaurants, and dock workers, says he has obtained a three-page signed statement from a crew member on the boat that rescued the burning rig’s workers. The sailor, who Buzbee refuses to name for fear of costing him his job, was on the ship’s bridge when Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, was speaking with someone in Houston via satellite phone. Buzbee told [I]Mother Jones[/I] that, according to this witness account, Harrell was screaming, "Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire! I told you this was gonna happen."
Whoever was on the other end of the line was apparently trying to calm Harrell down. “I am fucking calm,” he went on, according to Buzbee. "You realize the rig is burning?"
At that point, the boat’s captain asked Harrell to leave the bridge. It wasn’t clear whether Harrell had been talking to Transocean, BP, or someone else.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/06/the-rigs-on-fire-i-told-you-this-was-gonna-happen/57775/